Vote up?

The entire justification for the change boils down to this line of reasoning:

1. Given that: titles of works are often italicised and
2. given that: people’s names are not often italicised and
3. given that: most browsers italicise the contents of the cite element,
4. therefore: the cite element should not be used to mark up people’s names.

Isn’t that just your opinion of what the reasoning was?

If that is cited somewhere as being the reasoning then you COULD use that as strong base for ripping the proposed usage of <cite> to shreads, possibly along with the argument presented by Yoichiro Akiyama (#c003493).

But I have to ask – are you not missing the point? If you’ve got nothing to link to (i.e. you’re ‘citing’ a person) then what you’re actually doing is quoting them and as the spec says: <q cite=“http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element”>A citation is not a quote (for which the q element is appropriate).</q>

Why do you need that markup around a name – what does it manage to convey that the simple flow of the document doesn’t?

I’m all for revolution where it’s for good reason and it’s goal is valid but I think something a little twisted has happened here.

I’m all for healthy debate but you seem to have jumped straight past argument and rebuttal right onto revolution.